American Pie: Hoarders And Chuckers
Are you are hoarder or a chucker-outer? You will chuckle mightily as you read John Merchant's deliberations on this weighty question - and while chuckling and laughing out loud some of you will inevitably, and perhaps guiltily, be analysing your own habits.
Sometimes it seems that the world is divided between those who cannot bear to part with anything, and the rest of us who are compulsive winnowers and discarders. If you cast around among the couples you know, my bet is that in most cases one of each pair will be a hoarder, the other a chucker. I’m sure there are some exceptions, but it’s hard to imagine what their home would be like if both partners suffered from the same affliction. Barren minimalism on the one hand and claustrophobia on the other.
In the course of my casual research into the matter (in depth research is out of the question for me because I threw away all my books), I was disappointed to find that there is no clinical word to categorize either behavior. It’s all lumped under the obsessive-compulsive syndrome. However, a recently published book by Ron Alford, trademarks the word for compulsive hoarders as suffering from Disposophobia.
Ron describes himself as an author, trainer, speaker and coach, and claims to be the savior of people who cannot bear to get rid of their stuff. His web page ronalford.theplan.com shows a picture of him taken in what I imagine is his office, surrounded by just about as much stuff as anyone could pack into it, so I’m not convinced. I fairly itched to get in there with a couple of large garbage bags.
My mother was an insipient hoarder but was never able to get really serious about it. Living through two world wars, and a pretty sparse period in between them, didn’t exactly provide her with many opportunities. However, her eyes really lit up when, early in WWII, the British government advised people to make a cache of canned goods to help them through periods when food supplies might fail. What she never knew, thank heaven, was that apparently it isn’t necessary to have real stuff in order to become a hoarder.
There is in fact a clinically identified condition called Syllogomania, which is the obsessive hoarding of rubbish. There are also other ways to gratify the need to have and to hold. I once received a desperate letter from a woman asking my company to remove her husband’s name from our mailing list. She had apparently written to many other companies with the same request. It seemed that her husband filled every form offering to send product literature on request. Their garage was piled to overflowing with brochures!
As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, I’m the good guy, the chucker, and my wife is the bad guy. The absolute worst thing to say to her is “Have you finished with…..” or, “do you still need….” Even if she hadn’t used whatever it is, or thought about it for months or even years, it will suddenly become her most treasured possession or can’t live without item. In twenty years of marriage I still haven’t learned not to ask those questions.
Christmas and birthday cards, newspaper clippings never once referred to, data needed at some unspecified time in the future for a research project, worn out clothes, cancelled checks, her parents bed, out of date catalogs – all fair game for my squirrelly wife. To add insult to injury, she also claims to be able to retrieve any item at will. Only occasionally do I put her system, or lack of, to the test. It makes her so angry when she can’t find whatever it is that I’ve stopped asking. Her final retort is always, “Well I know it’s here somewhere!”
When my previous marriage ended in divorce, it was almost like a blood letting for me to be able to go through my home and remove every trace of my ex-wife’s presence. For two years afterwards I joyfully lived in a house where there wasn’t a single extraneous item. Early in my relationship with my present wife, I asked her to move in with me and make my house her home. What was I thinking? The moving in part was fine. Making it her home was an invitation to start another cache.
Her primary cache was at the house she shared with her mother, another hoarder. It was a large, old house with a capacious, damp basement. Originally designed for the storage of root vegetables through the winter, and for coal, the basement was a gift for two pack rats such as them. When I first came on the scene, the basement was packed with the detritus of seventy years of hoarding.
At first it was fascinating to speculate what might be included in the stash. Perhaps a family heirloom or two, maybe a lost Renoir, or at the very least a few antique items. Since neither my wife nor her mother could, in the fine tradition of hoarders, bear to sort through it, I was more than happy to be their salvation. For the next two years I sifted, sorted, dumped and burned stuff, every weekend.
Three lawn sprays, five deck chairs with no seats, one hundred copies of Home and Garden magazine, a cubic yard of papers from my wife’s doctoral thesis research, four rotten garden hoses, ten, gallon cans of solidified house paint, and on and on and on. Antiques – none, heirlooms – nada, the lost Renoir - you must be joking. Not a single item of value or utility did I find. My wife and her mother would stand and cry as they watched me dispose of their treasures.
In truth there were some items that might be of use to somebody, perhaps another hoarder. So I piled them by the roadside with a “Help Yourself” sign on them. They were gone in less than an hour! In my imagination I visualized a darkened, cluttered hovel, piled high with our stuff and that of others. In the light of a flickering candle, a shadowy figure croons over rusted-through buckets, cups with no handles and spent ball point pens, muttering “Precious things, precious things.”
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